HOw many times can I say it? if the dumped stat never comes up and has any consequence I'm going to make sure it appears and they don't act like it doesn't exist
They always come into play though. Your just being a jerk about it by adding them on just to make people look stupid or feel bad about dumping. I don't care if it was a life or death or not, you shouldn't go out of your way to make people feel bad for using dump stats. Your taking a personal problem out on the player. Its not really his problem, its yours.
Wow...You dump a stat for a bonus and having it actually come up once in a while as a consequence is "making them feel bad" ?
It already comes up. Your going out of your way for them however, and gunning for them because they dumped a stat. There is a difference.
Epic fail yet again Rynjin.
It's not going to be skin off of a Wizard's ass to lose melee to hit and damage when he's carefully in the back and able to always be behind someone.
Carrying capacity often isn't going to matter when the Barbarian agrees to carry a lot of the groups stuff.
Again, these things are often avoided having the rest of the group make up for your huge flaws.
THe barbarian carries gear with the wizard having 7 strength and the wizard makes up for the dumb barbarian by making knowledge checks. This is common for min-maxing.
HOw many times can I say it? if the dumped stat never comes up and has any consequence I'm going to make sure it appears and they don't act like it doesn't exist
Just because it doesn't affect him because he purposefully avoids everything to do with said penalty doesn't mean the penalty doesn't exist. The Wizard can't do jack shit without his magic and his party if he has low physical stats. That's the downside to dumping Str, or Dex, or Con.
If the dumped stat never comes up because the party member has done everything in his power to mitigate and avoid anything to do with the dumped stat. that means the stat and consequences HAVE come up and DO exist.
Wow...You dump a stat for a bonus and having it actually come up once in a while as a consequence is "making them feel bad" ?
It really isn't personal or vindictive. If I was so pissed off about it I'd just disallow it from the beginning.
People want to complain that they aren't getting the creative freedom to make their "concept" and he happens to have a 7 strength..if I have it actually come up now it's me being mean and making them feel bad.
I've never done this personally, but is the cliche of having the Wisdom dumped barbarian get mind controlled bullying too?
If someone can't deal with (likely) sucking at some rolls in a game then they have bigger problems.
Dumping Wis and ending up with a shitty Will save is exactly the same as dumping Str and ending up with a shitty carrying capacity and melee output. It's a mechanical penalty imposed by the stat itself being low.
If the Barbarian goes out of his way to avoid it ever coming up (Having the Wizard counterspell, investing in Superstition and save boosting items, etc.) then that same stat has been compensated for and there's no reason you should go out of your way to "punish" the Barbarian for "pretending the stat penalty doesn't exist".
There's a difference between letting the party be hindered by its weaknesses that they failed to make up for, and PUNISHING them BECAUSE they have weaknesses they've shored up.
The former is what happens when the Wizard needs to Climb something and was dumb enough not to prepare Spider Climb or Fly or the Barbarian with no investment in saves gets put to sleep or Dominated.
The latter is when those characters shore up said weaknesses and you go out of your way to harass them for having it in the first place.
One is the natural course of the game. The other is poor DMing.
It's like if you kick your friend in the nuts every time you see him because he never bothered to wear a cup everywhere he goes and then when he decides to do so before he goes to see you next time you get pissed off and start trying to jab him in the eye with a fork because he's "pretending his testicles don't exist".
You act as though its not going to be game relevant...
I could tell you the same thing. Your specifically telling me it won't come up unless you enforce it.
And it will likely cause a memorable and amusing game moment..the fact that the weak wizard is having trouble getting up the wall will likely cause everyone to laugh and the Player to facepalm and chuckle. If he gets that butthurt about this situation then grow up or gtfo. If he couldn't handle this situation in stride then that's the type of whiney b@$#+ I don't want at my table. He can go cry in his coco puffs and sob his way through life.
That's like, the definition of bullying. "Lol, everyone laugh at the wizard who can't get up the wall!" sound like "lol, everyone laugh at the nerd who can't climb the wall in gym!" Your going out of your way to create that situation, and then saying if they can't handle it they're whiney. Never mind your going out of your way to do it, because you don't like dump stats.
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The consequence is the opportunity cost requisite to shoring up a weakness.
Had the weakness not existed in the first place, the resources used to mitigate its effects could have been used to boost the character's strengths. If the Wizard had 10 Str, he could easily climb the knotted rope by taking 10.
As it is, he is now forced to burn a spell to Spider Climb or Fly up there, which he could have used for something else had he not dumped that stat.
Same concept with the Barbarian.
Having to find a workaround implies there is something to work around. The "something" in this case being your weakness, and the consequence being you have to burn resources and spend class features to work around it instead of going straight through it like a similar character without said weakness would have been able to do.
And simply because you don't like my analogy, it doesn't make it pointless. It highlights pretty much exactly what you were saying, that a weakness that can't be seen (because it's been covered up) doesn't exist. THAT is the ridiculous argument in this conversation, I just pointed it out to you.
I'm not talking about players and how things they might do might be right or wrong. The fact that you think I am tells you are still stuck in looking at this from the wrong paradigm.
Stop looking at this as a problem players may/may not commit. It is limiting your thinking on the issue and leads you to only one possible way of dealing with this problem, a problem you are creating for yourself.
You are talking about dealing with a problematic player behavior, I'm not talking about that at all.
When you reply to me and you feel the urge to write about problematic player behavior, you aren't actually replying to me.
When you were talking about problems previously you were talking about the puzzle situations we were talking about. It was confusing and appeared you were talking about a problem as in a conflict between Gm and players.
Regardless my above post shows how I'd deal with this situation to answer any questons you may have about where I stand on this.
I am talking about understanding how a scene/encounter/scenario and what you, the DM, put in it matters and changes how the players interact, not just with the encounter, but with each other, their own characters and the game.
Once you change how you view puzzles, their relationship to Intelligence (the game stat) changes and the problem disappears.
Roleplaying game engage participants in lots of different ways during the course of play. I'm sure you'd agree that combat and social encounters are fun in different ways. Even in combat, there are very different elements of engagement for the players.
I can play and find my boardgaming/tactical nature is engaged in planning out how I do something. While my roleplaying nature is engaged as to the why I am doing something in a combat. The rewards for such engagement is different and I like them each to varying degrees from combat to combat and session to session.
A well placed puzzle is it's own type of engagement. A DM should be aware of how a puzzle engages the players. To ignore how a DM engages the players and then be frustrated by what happens, strikes me as ignorance of how puzzles work in RPGs. Much like the dog owner who is mad at their dog who eats the steak you leave on the floor. That analogy isn't about the player, it's about the DM who doesn't understand the situation they are creating.
A puzzle engages a player's brain. Not their character's brain, their own brain. This is a fundamental fact about puzzles. When you (any DM) put a puzzle in front of a player, you have actively chosen to engage the players brain. You are in fact, asking the player to use their brain to solve a problem. If you had intended for the character to solve the problem, you would have asked for an Intelligence check.
Therefore, the problem isn't the player in this situation, it is the expectations of the GM. Once the GM changes their expectations, the problem immediately disappears.
I put puzzles in games because I know my PLAYERS like solving them, not because they write backstories that involve solving puzzles.
As I said the assumption is that the player is laughing with them. If he takes himself and the character so seriously that he takes it personally that his character can't get up a wall he needs to severely lighten up.
I never said I hated dumped stats, just that if you're going to be so deficient in a certain area, it should come up in more than just the bad BAB you never roll or the low encumberance that never comes up.
a low encumbrance is always relevant, most martials can only carry so much gear before they are weighed down, usually a little over 100 lbs is likely, but at least a third of it goes to armor.
As I said the assumption is that the player is laughing with them. If he takes himself and the character so seriously that he takes it personally that his character can't get up a wall he needs to severely lighten up.
I never said I hated dumped stats, just that if you're going to be so deficient in a certain area, it should come up in more than just the bad BAB you never roll or the low encumberance that never comes up.
If they don't agree with your humor, then they're whiney. If they use dump stats, you punish them. Have I got it correct?
You don't get a "great reward". You get, at most, an extra +1 on checks involving that stat, from the difference between a 14 and a 16 (16 or 18 with racial mods).
Likewise, you get a cool -2 to all checks taken by your dump stat.
Seems like a fair trade to me.
I'm not seeing the "great reward" here.
You've got decent (good for 1st level) Charisma...but shitty Str (an all that entails), HP/Fort saves, AC, and average Will saves and Skill points (aka jack all for a Sorcerer).
There's certainly nothing that you need to be punished for beyond what having had less HP up until you bumped your Con up and almost no AC imparts. Even now with a whopping d6+lolno per level you're not doing so hot.
You have clear and glaring weaknesses that the game itself will try to screw you for on a regular basis, I'm just not seeing why the GM has to go out of his way to add on to that even if you find a way around a few of them.
I'm not seeing what kind of point that post was supposed to make.
The DM is always engaging the players brain. This is part of roleplaying. Your character is imaginary. He doesn't have a brain so your brain is vicariously your characters brain. You are the player playing as that character so what your character thinks and what you think blur together at some point..You can't try to completely separate them and say "well that's my character's brain now" and then just do rolls. When you play as your character you're using your own brain to sometimes solve situations because you can't completely change into another person. Again, there is a good deal of leeway here because I cannot completely change myself. It would be impossible to judge what the intelligence score would be of every action to know if it was perfectly character appropriate. It would be impossible for a moderately intelligent person to become a genius like his character. It is, however, possible to reasonably expect that a player (using his own brain of course) can figure out how to be considerably...I am talking about understanding how a scene/encounter/scenario and what you, the DM, put in it matters and changes how the players interact, not just with the encounter, but with each other, their own characters and the game.
Once you change how you view puzzles, their relationship to Intelligence (the game stat) changes and the problem disappears.
Roleplaying game engage participants in lots of different ways during the course of play. I'm sure you'd agree that combat and social encounters are fun in different ways. Even in combat, there are very different elements of engagement for the players.
I can play and find my boardgaming/tactical nature is engaged in planning out how I do something. While my roleplaying nature is engaged as to the why I am doing something in a combat. The rewards for such engagement is different and I like them each to varying degrees from combat to combat and session to session.
A well placed puzzle is it's own type of engagement. A DM...
You should reread that post earlier, where I said if you feel the need to discuss what is and is not appropriate player behavior, you aren't actually addressing the points I'm bringing up. At this point should I assume you don't want to talk to me, but rather at me?
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Since you had brought it back up my response as a GM if this was post fact is I would have given you a look and told you after the game to next time let the rest of the group mull it over since you chose to dump your intelligence.
So because my character is not smart I have to sit out of parts of the game?
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Hey, look at this!
One particularly sticky area of metagaming has nothing to do with game mechanics, but rather real- world knowledge and intelligence. Sometimes the player who’s a genius at solving puzzles and riddles wants to play a dumb brute of a swordsman. This is great—so long as his character isn’t still solving all the puzzles. In this situation (or the reverse, where the player who’s terrible at puzzles has an Intelligence score of 22), let all the players work together to solve the puzzle, but use skill checks and Intelligence checks to offer hints or determine who actually comes up with the solution. Similarly, don’t fall into the trap of letting a player’s knowledge base inform the character’s beyond what’s reasonable. Just because your player knows how to make gunpowder out of bat guano doesn’t mean his uneducated half ling cleric does.
The same is true of someone who uber minmaxes like if I'd dumped str and then let race lower it and dumped another stat for points. If I survive to 3-4th+ the "cost" to shore up any deficiencies later is so much less than the cost of shoring them up at character creation. You become great enough at one or two things that your heavy impact on the game while those deficiencies shrink to becoming really unimportant.
And I don't see what the issue with this is. Everybody uses their strengths to cover their weaknesses, be it in a game or in real life.
There's no reason to purposefully slam them in the face with it at every turn because you've decided he's trying to "pretend the weakness doesn't exist" because he's compensated for it.
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There's nothing to say you can't contribute like any other part of the game, but being RP appropriate you're probably not going to contribute anything meaningful to the puzzle just like the goat isn't going to be the center of conversation in the dungeon.
So I CAN give the answer to the puzzle if I know it. I just can't have my character give it.
And if its some math puzzle and the dumb guy as the Player occasionally calls out a number I'm not going to throw dice at him. But if he's the center of the conversation like, "Ok using this formula and when carrying the 1 we can see that.." then no. And again as I said, if I'm giving hints and no one is getting it after so long that its dragging the game and the "dumb char" is sitting there shaking his head with the answer ofc I'll let him spill the beans.
But it's not my character in the center of the conversation. It's the other players characters using my ideas.
No where did I say I'm purposefully slamming in them in the face at every turn over this issue. That's a obvious gross overstatement.
You're making them significantly more powerful in certain categories than they would be as a rounded person. This is an issue of disagreement of whether someone thinks the cons of the dump balance outweigh the pros of bumping the stats.
I have never actually seen it m but has anyone ever dumped a stat to 7 to get three 13s and two 14s? I doubt it, but I'd probably overlook the 7 more in this scenario.
I'm not sure it is.
Maybe it's the games I play (mostly APs, Serpent's Skull and Carrion Crown so far) but things like Climb, Swim, Acrobatics checks to balance, Will saves, etc. all come up pretty darn often as it is, usually causing difficulty for the players who suck at those things. Our full plated character fell into a vat of acid in Carrion Crown because he couldn't make his check to balance well enough, I'd say that's a consequence for his choices (not putting points in Acrobatics, mostly. He had a good Dex but not enough to outweigh the ACP totally).
I just don't see any reason to add MORE just because someone dumped a stat or made some character choice with a downside that already comes up often enough.
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As the above part says, at that point now, yes it would technically be something like you are all somewhat RPing each other's character as you contribute to other players' brains who in turn put it through their character to solve it..if that makes any sense.
Since my fellow players are probably playing characters with Int scores far above their own, I don't see the problem with me lending my brain power to theirs to make up for the lack. I know the group together probably doesn't equal an 18 Int, so it is perfectly fair to let other peoples ideas come from the characters mouth, since in character he is smarter than all of us.
And no, I've never seen that South Park. Horrible show.
I have this problem with all of my characters....as none of my characters can ever get high enough int score to reflect my intelligence in real life. ;)
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No where did I say I'm purposefully slamming in them in the face at every turn over this issue. That's a obvious gross overstatement.
You're making them significantly more powerful in certain categories than they would be as a rounded person. This is an issue of disagreement of whether someone thinks the cons of the dump balance outweigh the pros of bumping the stats.
I have never actually seen it m but has anyone ever dumped a stat to 7 to get three 13s and two 14s? I doubt it, but I'd probably overlook the 7 more in this scenario.
I'm not sure it is.
Maybe it's the games I play (mostly APs, Serpent's Skull and Carrion Crown so far) but things like Climb, Swim, Acrobatics checks to balance, Will saves, etc. all come up pretty darn often as it is, usually causing difficulty for the players who suck at those things. Our full plated character fell into a vat of acid in Carrion Crown because he couldn't make his check to balance well enough, I'd say that's a consequence for his choices (not putting points in Acrobatics, mostly. He had a good Dex but not enough to outweigh the ACP totally).
I just don't see any reason to add MORE just because someone dumped a stat or made some character choice with a downside that already comes up often enough.
If Climb/Swim etc. come up fairly regularly in the game then obviously I don't need to double the amount of it. That player is already realizing "it's great being smart..but being weak sucks too!". He doesn't hate his character, but he realizes the drawback. If it's never coming up other than in encumberance and bab then I'll add more of it.
Flipside: If someone dumps Int and Cha, I'm not going to let them sit in the back 100% of the time in social situations. Something is going to come up where their cha will come into play regardless of how shy/awkward/whatever their character is.
you must really enjoy alienating wallflowers? don't you?
some player characters will dump int/cha because the player has a handicap that hinders their ability to express their needs IRL. i wouldn't put these "wallflowers" in the spotlight.
i would also see it as bullying those players with less self esteem.
some players, just don't like being forced to come up with on the spot monologues when they are limited in the amount of social pressure they can take.
my cousin is pretty darn shy IRL, she doesn't like being placed in excessive amounts of spotlight and prefers to play supporting roles due to the lessened spotlight.
she is more the type to play the shy and socially akward tagalong maid more often than the outspoken thespian.
it is also why i prefer to play characters of lower social classes. less chance of building spotlight than the noble scion who follows us.
i like being different, like my cousin does, but we don't want to deal with an excessive amount of spotlight, and our DM well, forces it upon us. and out of the entire group, i am probably the least versed on matters involving law, humanity, or honor. idolozing monsters and performing whatever cruelties an RPG allows that i can get away with.
If Climb/Swim etc. come up fairly regularly in the game then obviously I don't need to double the amount of it. That player is already realizing "it's great being smart..but being weak sucks too!". He doesn't hate his character, but he realizes the drawback. If it's never coming up other than in encumberance and bab then I'll add more of it.
Flipside: If someone dumps Int and Cha, I'm not going to let them sit in the back 100% of the time in social situations. Something is going to come up where their cha will come into play regardless of how shy/awkward/whatever their character is.
They likely already realize it sucks to have a low score. They chose to take the penalty anyway. You shouldn't have to force them to "realize" anything. Usually what you dump comes up regardless of any DM intervention. The way you state it has to be done it feels like your gunning for someone. When someone doesn't put any points into sleight of hand are you sure it comes up?
Usually other players try to keep my 7 charisma character from speaking. I try my best to prove them otherwise. Hilariously, my last 7 charisma character was more diplomatic than the other players because I wanted to make up for it. Sometimes people dump stats to play what they want, or rather to not have to be involved with something, as strange as that sounds. I'd rather not see it forced on them.
This person came to a social gathering to socialize with other people.
I should note that I've met many sociophobic, agoraphobic, or socially inept gamers in my life. Its not that unusual.
Usually other players try to keep my 7 charisma character from speaking. I try my best to prove them otherwise. Hilariously, my last 7 charisma character was more diplomatic than the other players because I wanted to make up for it.I approve of this roleplaying situation.
Yes, its usually because I don't like sharing my character sheet and people don't realize I have a +11 diplomacy to their 8. Regardless, I don't like the DM putting a spotlight on me just because I have 7.
And so everyone knows you have a 7 cha but not that you have an 11 diplomacy?
That's how it goes sometimes. Easier to spot your charisma and pop to conclusions than memorize someone's character sheet I suppose. Usually I don't share anyway.
i never Dump Int because i hate playing a character with less than 4-5 skill points per level
but i will gladly Dump Cha because i am not a fan of getting into excessive dialogues or excessive debates between DM and player. though i will still keep a decent enough diplomacy to purchase magical equipment with thanks to Weekly William's stupid fighter crippling houserule.
the houserule being that purchasing magic items requires a series of diplomacy checks with a DC=to 20+the item's caster level for each item.
good thing most of our crap usually has low caster levels, for the powerful stuff, the party bard charges a 10% negotiations fee.